Return to the British Museum - sort of

The BM has reopened. So much, so good, hurrah! 

But it's not the BM as we know it, where you can pick a few galleries on a topic of your choice and wander at your leisure. Nope. You have to follow the one way system round only the ground floor galleries. To be honest, there is only so much Egyptian statuary and so many Greek vases that one wants to look at in one lifetime. Also, the Elgin marbles, well, yes, but seen them too often, especially when the kids were little. 

So, unless you have a burning desire to do all these things again, then best wait till one of the forthcoming exhibitions - on the Arctic, and Tantra -  open later in the autumn. The Benin bronzes aside, I wish I had. One bonus was Grayson Perry's Memorial to the Unknown Craftsman. That was worth seeing.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018

This year Grayson Perry did most of the honours in selecting and hanging the exhibition of Art Made Now. Thankfully the totally overused in inappropriate ways word 'curate' was nowhere to be seen. He had the galleries painted some pretty lurid shades of yellow and pink though, but they worked well.

There was nothing ground breaking, but there never is, and that, in a way, is not the point of this most democratic of shows, where five Sooty puppets stand as much chance of being selected as a sign for Unaffordable Housing or a bunch of painted sticks.

I enjoyed spotting the new work by some of my favourites like Tracey Emin (one painting and three lovely prints.- all figurative), Bill Viola (a mesmerising video from his people walking across the desert series), and Perry himself (huge print and lovely white people pot - a ceramic of Alan his teddy bear is hiding in the basement, only to be seen by members if they go down to the secret bar).

There was an anti-leave Banksy priced, of course, of £350 million, a new Anish Kapoor in the main courtyard (a huge red disk, hanging over a pile of weathered and vegetated basalt columns plundered from somewhere), and a host of generally lovely prints on the second floor.

The galleries were packed the day I visited as it was pouring with rain and in the exhibition's last week. We headed straight to the downstairs member's bar for coffee and later, lunch. Sssh don't tell anyone but the bar, which also serves food, is quiet even when the member's rooms are packed, and you have two glossy tree ferns to enjoy in the little courtyard.

I am pleased to report that the, no doubt ironically chosen, portraits of Farage and Moseley remained unsold.

Grayson Perry at the Serpentine Gallery

 The tongue in cheek Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! is indeed proving so, given that I made the school girl error of trying to get in on the first Saturday afternoon after it opened. But the 40 minute queue was worth it.

I love Grayson Perry, and so it seems does everyone else. Who would have thunk it that a transvestite potter, as he describes himself, would become a living national treasure, yet he and his alter-ego, Claire, have.

Yes, he makes some obvious points, but they are ones worth making and his affectionate portrait of the nation is one we need to look at in these troubled times.

Thinking about the great inequalities in our country, whilst celebrating all its eccentricities is the order of the day in everything from the pair of Brexit pots, one of which is ever so slightly bigger than the other, to the wall sized tapestries, such as the stereotype map of Britain and the even larger one portraying our urban landscape complete with a traffic jam, burning car in a scrubby field, and grafittied skate park, to the personalised motorbike and cycle, to his sketch books.

The Serpentine has packed its three rooms with much to consider and the irony of buying a The Liberal Elite fridge magnet was not lost on me.

The Grayson Perry House, Wrabness

Wrabness is a small nowhere kind of a place on the incredibly beautiful Stour estuary in Essex, blighted only by views of Feilxstowe, but docks and container ports have to go somewhere now,  don't they? There is a railway station, a pub or two, a community shop and the Grayson Perry House.

Nothing to see inside unless you book it at vast expense from the Landmark Trust, but it's free to walk around the garden fence and take a few photographs of this amazing confection for Perry's fictional all-Essex woman, Julie. Go on a sunny day when the roof is positively golden and it is something of a marvel.